Benedict XVI's first encyclical: "God is love".

CATHOLICS HAVE GROWN WEARY WITH PAPAL ENCYCLICALS in recent decades. Typically they have become tedious exercises in admonitions and warnings. The hidden or overt text is to shake the finger against the modern world, against materialism, women's independence, birth control, abortion and forms of the family that represent an alternative to heterosexual marriage. Although the first encyclical by Benedict XVI does not show any softening of the views that underlay such warnings, he has chosen to almost entirely avoid the tone of admonition and rebuke. Instead he has sought to provide the vision of the faith that inspires him and which he hopes will inspire other Catholic Christians throughout the world. This is a welcome choice. The encyclical should be judged by how well he has succeeded in providing a credible vision for people seeking to be Christians in the world of the 21st century.

The encyclical is divided into two sections. The first is his theological and philosophical reflection on the nature of God as love. For Benedict, the idea of God as love is the astonishing insight of the Christian message, although not lacking in intimations in the Jewish and Greek worlds. But the special message of Christianity is that God so deeply loves us as to be willing to sacrifice god-self for our redemption, for our fullness of well-being. God's love trumps God's justice, manifest in forgiving love. Benedict also strives to overcome the dualisms of soul and body, eros and agape, erotic love and self-giving love, to find a synthesis of the two in a love that is both self-giving and ecstatically mutual. God's outpouring of love for us also must overflow in love for one another. For Benedict this is most completely expressed in the love relation between man and woman in monogamous marriage. But it is also expressed in many forms of loving care for the other.

The second half of the encyclical mms to the work of love, or caritas, that is the specific social expression of the church in society. Here Benedict engages in some Marxism-bashing in order to define the church's charitable work in a way that does not neglect the work of justice or simply maintain the status quo. Since the Marxist challenge is now seen as fading away, space is cleared for the church's social teachings to re-establish themselves as maintaining the proper balance between love and justice, church and state.

For Benedict the work of the state is properly the establishment of a just society. In a statement that would be worth repeating in many political arenas today, he declares, "Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics." It is not the job of the church to take over the work of justice from the state. Moreover the church should not use its charitable work to proselytize. The state must be a sphere of religious freedom and "guarantee religious freedom and harmony between followers of different religions." We are a long way from classical Catholic Christendom here. The church's vision of redeemed humanity in God's love has a role to play in lifting up a holistic vision of justice and inspiring the laity to be the agents in society to work for justice.

But justice, no matter how fully realized, doesn't do away with the need for loving service to others. There are problems of human finitude and vulnerability that can never be resolved by justice alone. Here is the place for the specific work of the church, not by itself, but in collaboration with other people of faith. The church needs to work to provide that service to others in their concrete material needs, which also manifests a loving care that communicates the message that everyone is a person of worth whom God loves. Thus Benedict seeks to carefully delineate and yet interrelate the spheres of church and state, and the work of love and justice proper to each.

This is a vision that many liberation theologians could probably embrace. Or at least it could be taken seriously by those who wish to lift up a vision of justice and yet not try to create a new Christendom that merges church and state. Hope for a coming Reign of God as an earthly horizon, as well as a heavenly one, is not part of Benedict's vision, but the work of the church in challenging the state to do its work of justice is well articulated. The second part of the encyclical concludes with the words, "Love is possible, and we are able to practice it because we are created in the image of God. To experience love and in this way to cause the light of God to enter into the world--this is the invitation I would like to extend with the present Encyclical." In a world grown increasingly despondent with the shattering of so many hopes, it is an invitation worth considering.

ROSEMARY RADFORD RUETHER is the Carpenter Professor of Feminist Theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and senior scholar at the Claremont Graduate University, both in California, and a CFFC board member.